Vehicle operators tend to spend a significant amount of time in their vehicles particularly when commuting from a home to a workplace, running errands, conducting business, vacationing, or for many other reasons. This time is significant enough that some vehicles come equipped with a variety of consumer electronics such as compact disc (CD) players, cassette tape players, radios, satellite radios, electronic gaming, and digital video disc (DVD) players. Some owners may also choose to equip their vehicle with aftermarket consumer electronics in the event their vehicles lack such consumer electronics or for purposes of customization. These and other entertainment or infotainment electronic devices provide a passenger in the vehicle with time-occupying options and may improve the passenger's quality of time.
Consumer electronics such as CD players, cassette tape players, DVD players, and electronic gaming generally have related media content for playback residing on a localized storage medium. For example, many on-board navigation systems utilize geographic information stored on CD's. This information may be downloaded to a memory specifically associated with the navigation system, located in the vehicle, or directly accessed from the CD by the navigation system. In another example, CD players commonly play media that is stored on CD. Most of these playback devices can accept a limited number of storage media during operation and thereby generally have a relatively limited capacity of media selection. For example, a CD player with a six (6) disc CD changer has a selection of music tracks that are limited to any six CD's contained in the CD changer.
Many households maintain a media collection on home personal computers (PCs). For example, back-up copies of media stored on CD's may be downloaded to a home PC. Additionally, a variety of compressed digital audio formats, as well as video formats, may be downloaded to the home PC, such as through a web-based music subscription, to further contribute to the media collection.
Accordingly, it is desirable to provide a multimedia data storage system for a vehicle that stores a variety of multimedia files therein and that may be synchronized with multimedia files stored on a home PC. In addition, it is desirable to provide an electronic vehicle storage system having stored multimedia files that may be synchronized with multimedia files stored on a home PC triggered by an action, such as a key fob button press. Furthermore, it is desirable to provide a hard disk drive for a vehicle having embedded content corresponding to downloadable multimedia files that may be synchronized with a remote data storage device while preserving vehicle battery power. Finally, other desirable features and characteristics of the present invention will become apparent from the subsequent detailed description and the appended claims, taken in conjunction with the accompanying drawings and the foregoing technical field and background.